A bill was reported to the senate, abating executive patronage, which Mr. Clay supported by a speech, on the eighteenth of February, 1835, embodying an accurate account of the multifarious evils resulting from the selfish and arbitrary course pursued by the chief magistrate――evils which no lover of his country and her liberties could contemplate but with apprehensions of terror. He also spoke in favor of making an appropriation for continuing the construction of the Cumberland road, and against surrendering it to the control of the states through which it passed. During the session of 1835–6, a further consideration of the subject of French spoliations was had. Mr. Clay, being again placed at the head of the committee on foreign relations, on the eleventh of January, 1836, introduced a resolution to the senate, calling on the president for information relative to our affairs with France. Three weeks subsequently, he introduced another, calling for the _exposé_ which accompanied the French bill of indemnity, for certain notes which passed between the Duc de Broglie, and our _chargé_, Mr. Barton, and those between our minister, Mr. Livingston, and the French minister of foreign affairs. With some modifications, these resolutions were adopted. On the announcement of the president, February eighth, 1836, that Great Britain had offered her mediation between the United States and France, Mr. Clay took occasion to remark that he could not withhold the expressions of his congratulations to the senate, for the agency it had in producing the happy termination of our difficulties with France. If the senate had not, by its unanimous vote of last September, declared that it was inexpedient to adopt any legislative action upon the subject of our relations with France, if it had yielded to the recommendations of the executive, in ordering reprisals against that power, it could not be doubted but that war would have existed, at that moment, in its most serious state. On the fourteenth of April, Mr. Clay’s land bill was taken up in the senate, and discussed at length, for several days, during which he ably and faithfully defended it. On the twenty-sixth, he made a speech in its behalf, which was not far behind his most brilliant efforts. In reference to it says the National Intelligencer, ‘we thought, after hearing the able and comprehensive arguments of Messrs. Ewing, Southard, and White, in favor of this beneficent measure, that the subject was exhausted; that, at any rate, but little new could be urged in its defence. Mr. Clay, however, in one of the most luminous and forcible arguments which we have ever heard him deliver, placed the subject in new lights, and gave to it new claims to favor. The whole train of his reasoning appeared to us a series of demonstrations.’